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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

I bought a diesel pickup a few years ago, specifically because I wanted something that was less harmful to the environment (and needed a large truck for an audiovisual company I'd founded, and now need it to haul my house around as I've moved into a travel trailer and will be traveling full-time again). I suppose I, too, was duped by the propaganda of the diesel industry.

I haven't been able to figure out how wildly mistaken I was in making the decision to buy diesel over gasoline for environmental reasons. Most newer trucks have the urea-based system to reduce emissions, but mine is old enough to pre-date that addition.

Even with the regulations being stricter in the US for some time, am I driving a climate nightmare despite trying to choose the more efficient option? (It does get somewhat better mileage than the gasoline version of the same truck. So, at the very least, I'm burning less fuel. That counts for something, right?)

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If your truck gets better fuel economy than an equivalent unleaded engine, you are producing less CO2. The "40x" pollution number for the VW engines refers to nitrogen oxides only, which are bad for people but not the climate problem that CO2 is. Throwing that 40x number around while ignoring the CO2 and fuel economy seems very misleading.

Unless you've set up your truck to belch pillars of soot and smoke, I wouldn't worry about your purchase decision vs. gasoline.

"Unless you've set up your truck to belch pillars of soot and smoke"

Those people make no goddamned sense, to me. The folks who make their vehicles noisier also make no sense. Anyway, my truck has had no modifications and it passes emissions testing.

According to the EPA [1] CO2 accounts for 82% of all US greenhouse gases from human activity, and 31% of that CO2 comes from transportation.

The EPA says [2] that N20 account for 5% of all US greenhouse cases from human activity, and 5% of that N2O comes from transportation. N2O is a more effective greenhouse gas, with a Global Warming Potential 298 times that of CO2.

31% of 81% is about 100 times as much as 5% of 5%, but when you then include the GWP of 298 for the N2O, doesn't that mean that the N2O emissions from transportation are actually about 3 times as damaging as the CO2 emissions?

That also implies that any reduced CO2 in the VW cars is not going to be anywhere near enough to even make a dent in compensating for the extra damage from a 40x increase in N2O.

[1] http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.htm...

[2] http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/n2o.htm...

I think the VW problem was with NO and NO2, rather than N2O. I don't know if they are greenhouse gases, but they do cause smog and/or other human problems.

Your single truck has no impact either way. It's like a drop of food coloring in a swimming pool. If you feel like it was a mistake, don't buy another one. But you have it. Use it, drive it, enjoy it.

I think that's a cop out. One could say it about any individual act; in aggregate, everyone thinking that way is a recipe for the ecological disaster we're currently in.

Admittedly, without policy change for the very large polluters, any individual act is a drop in the bucket. Nonetheless, individual decisions matter when scaled across populations of hundreds of millions.

Ultimately neither are ideal for the environment, it's just diesel by products are worse for humans than gasoline and contribute more to smog.

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